A turbine section generally includes moving parts that encounter hot fluids (steam in the case of a steam turbine and hot gases in the case of a gas turbine). These moving parts can be affected by operating conditions of the turbine, for example, high temperatures, high pressures, high-speed rotations, and so forth. As a result, buckets, nozzles, airfoils, blades, and other hot gas path components are subject to failures, such as creep, fatigue, degradation, migration, liberation, shrouding, cracking, and so forth.
As can be expected, these various parts may deteriorate or fail over time and may need to be replaced when the overall performance of the turbine suffers as a result of a deteriorated or failed part. However, it is generally undesirable to wait for a part to malfunction or to fail completely before replacing the failed part, especially if such a replacement necessitates shutting down the turbine for an extended period of time. Consequently, in order to avoid such a situation, a turbine and its components need to undergo periodic testing in order to assess whether they have been subjected to failures and if they need to be repaired or replaced.
Conventional inspection methods can provide turbine inspectors with various information for evaluating the condition of a turbine component. However, the amount of information needed to evaluate a relatively large component such as a steam turbine rotor or other such part may be time consuming to process. Furthermore, the time to evaluate and process the amount of information gathered from a relatively large component such as a steam turbine rotor or other such part can add to the downtime of the turbine, which can be expensive.